Cord Jefferson on kindness

I am hopeful that my mother will be around to share many more years with us. But I’m now attempting to find some comfort in the idea that I can keep her close to me for as long as I live by struggling to remain decent, the pursuit that I’ve seen conjure up incredible power during the course of her life. The world takes from us relentlessly. It takes our friends and first loves. It takes our parents. It takes our faith. It takes our dignity. It takes our passion. It takes our health. It takes our honesty, and it takes our credulity. To lose so much and still hold onto yourself is perhaps the most complicated task human beings are asked to perform, which is why seeing it done with aplomb is as thrilling as looking at dinosaur bones or seeing a herd of elephants. It’s an honor to exist on Earth with these things.*
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on hydration/dehydration


There is a dearth of facts when it comes to hydration. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in researching the benefits of a free resource and dehydration isn’t a pressing public health issue requiring government funding. This leaves a profitable grey area for the drinks industry to exploit.*

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Chris Hedges: Cancel culture, where liberalism goes to die

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the end of inequality

the end of inequality: either “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” or “the common ruin of the contending classes”*

to say that “if we don’t mine the stuff someone else will” is obscene, but under capitalism today it makes perfect sense: amoral self-interest underpins the entire system*


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the three corporate objectives: growth, profitability, and pain avoidance

Paul Krugman quotes Charlie Stross in 2010:
Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.*

“I like it; it’s fun (although William Gibson said much the same thing, I think); but it’s so 1960s, if you know what I mean. … That was then.

“These days, we’re living in the world of the imperial, very self-interested individual; the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the man in the very expensive Armani suit.”

—Paul Krugman*


20210210T2054−08*
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